For the past fortnight, I have been baffled by the reaction of so many people to the fact that I accompanied my sister Nigella to court when she gave evidence in the fraud trial of her former assistants Elisabetta and Francesca Grillo — who were acquitted last week on a majority verdict.

They would invariably say how wonderful it was of me to show loyalty in such difficult circumstances.

Yet all I had done was to be with her while she was giving evidence as a prosecution witness: a stressful business for Nigella, to be sure, but involving no risk to me — and therefore there was no reason for me to be thought especially loyal in being alongside her in court.

It only dawned on me by the very end of the trial why even complete strangers would tell me what a good brother I had been. They were labouring under the misapprehension that Nigella had been on trial for great misdemeanours, rather than the Grillo sisters, who were the defendants.

This was confirmed when Nigella told me that people had been coming up to her in the street and saying: ‘I hope you get off.’

In a way, however, these members of the public had not misunderstood what had been going on in Isleworth Crown Court.

My sister had been on trial, only without benefit of defence lawyers — or even the support of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), whose witness she was. The reason for this was that the Judge, Robin Johnson, had allowed the two teams of defence lawyers to cross-examine Nigella on ‘bad character’.

This stemmed from the Grillos’ extraordinary claim that their £700,000 spree on haute couture and stays in five-star hotels had been agreed by Nigella because they knew that my sister was a habitual user of illegal drugs and that she wanted them to keep this fact a secret from her then husband — the well-known recluse about town, Charles Saatchi.

As the Guardian’s Deborah Orr commented on the day after the trial ended, this defence line could be characterised as ‘it wasn’t fraud, it was gentle, unspoken blackmail’.

It clearly was not a line that the CPS counsel took seriously. In court, Jane Carpenter QC said that the sisters had ‘dredged up’ the drugs allegations ‘to save their skins’, so, as the eminent lawyer Geoffrey Robinson observed after the trial, the CPS was not concerned to investigate them.

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Perhaps more pertinently, it was not a defence that the sisters had ventured originally after they were arrested or for many months after that.

During their first and second police interviews, they took the line of ‘no comment’. They refused to offer any explanation for a letter of apology and offer of amends for the expenditure they had written and which had been passed to the police.

Yet in November, shortly before the scheduled start of the trial and almost eight months after being charged, the Grillos’ lawyers came up with a completely new defence based on Nigella’s ‘bad character’.

Nigella Lawson (Saatchi) with her brother Dominic Lawson at a party in 1991

The defendants said they had not raised this before, because of ‘misplaced loyalty to Nigella’.

Judge Johnson, perhaps unsurprisingly, said he would not consider this application.

Then, about two weeks before the trial began, my sister received a wild email from Charles Saatchi after he had (somehow) seen confidential statements made by the Grillos to their solicitors.

It said: ‘Of course the Grillos will get off on the basis that you were off your head on drugs.’

It was actually Nigella who passed this email to the CPS —hardly the action of a woman who had something terrible to hide.

Yet the CPS sat on it for well over a week, so when it was finally passed to the judge, the defence felt able to argue it had been held back from the court.

Family picture: Nigella sitting laughing with her younger sister Thomasina, who died of breast cancer in 1993, and brother Dominic on the floor in front of them

At the last minute, Judge Johnson decided he would accept the ‘bad character’ defence. The CPS made no objection.

When the sisters’ allegations of habitual drug use were put to Nigella in court, she could have refused to answer — and the judge made it clear to her that she was under no obligation to say anything that might put her at risk of prosecution.

Yet Nigella is neither dishonest nor cowardly. She detailed to the court the full extent of her use of drugs.

On six occasions when her first husband, John Diamond, was dying of a particularly foul form of cancer, she had taken cocaine with him.

On one occasion she had taken cocaine during her marriage to Charles Saatchi. And at various times during the final year of that marriage, as it had become increasingly unbearable to her, she had smoked pot.

Dominic Lawson and his wife Rosa Monkton at a book launch in London in 2007

I have never knowingly taken illegal drugs, so I don’t regard such admissions to be of no significance. Yet I am close enough to my sister to know if she really had been — as the defence effectively claimed —addled by narcotics. In fact, Nigella is someone who — we are alike in this, at least —loathes being out of control or under any influence.

She drinks alcohol from time to time, but like many Jews of Ashkenazi origin, has a very low tolerance for the stuff (as do I).

Anyway, none of this prevented the Grillos’ lawyers from painting a picture of my sister as someone almost permanently drug-dazed, providing such direct quoted headlines for the avidly following Press as: Nigella ‘like druggie on council estate’.

How this could be true of someone who is not just voluptuously healthy in appearance but also immensely conscientious and reliable in her work, is a mystery — or rather it would be if the allegation had any basis in reality.

Yet this — and even more scurrilously worded accusations — were made day after day in court, long after Nigella had left the witness box and was in no position to rebut them.

Indeed, they continued after Charles Saatchi, on oath, had recanted the very email that had persuaded the judge to allow the ‘bad character’ defence.

Nigella had attempted to submit to the court a letter from her GP of many years, declaring she was not and never had been a habitual user of narcotics. But this was ruled out by the court process.

She was a witness and not a defendant and thus not entitled to submit any evidence on her own behalf, other than her response to specific questions under cross-examination. Interestingly, the Grillos’ defence team never asked any of Nigella’s assistants, when they were on the stand, if they had ever seen their employer taking drugs. But then lawyers are highly skilled at not asking questions that might elicit the wrong answer.

And while Nigella was on her feet, alone, for almost ten hours under cross-examination, it was noticeable to me in court how the defendants and their lawyers would go into huddles, presumably to take some new instructions.

As I sat a few feet away from my sister during this ordeal, I was overwhelmed with admiration.

She stood up proudly for the whole two-day process (even on 5 in heels!). She never hesitated over a single answer. Her voice was always clear and loud. And despite some reports that she was ‘emotional’ or ‘close to tears’, this was not the case.

Everything about her was calm and controlled — though once or twice she thumped her arms on the witness box in irritation at some of the more outlandish questions.

I could not imagine having the same strength in such circumstances. It made me wonder if my conceit over a lifetime of seeing myself as the stronger of the two of us might have been wrong all along: at the risk of seeming more a brother than an objective observer, I would say that her conduct in the witness box was heroic.

It was especially heroic, given the way what was meant to be a formal examination of transactions by two employees had turned into a media circus or rather an auto-da-fe — with this prosecution witness as the object to be paraded and tormented.

'Sometimes, those who see the best in others can suffer terrible betrayals. Nigella treated the Grillo sisters as friends — and she was to be bitterly disappointed'

I admit that when we spoke in the witness room during a break in proceedings, Nigella expressed her anger that she had been given no advice or support at any stage by the CPS.

Her solitary encounter with the CPS was when, just before she began her evidence, the prosecuting counsel came into the witness room and said: ‘I hope you are happy with everything.’

My sister’s icy response, ‘Happy is not the word I would choose,’ seemed to disconcert the QC, who hesitatingly replied: ‘Well, content, then?’ This time even Nigella was at a loss for words.

Of course it isn’t meant to be easy for a prosecution witness. Defendants in serious trials are faced with the loss of their liberty and even complete ruination.

So I can understand why Elisabetta Grillo’s lawyer, Anthony Metzer, spent hours asking my sister endless questions about each and every item of expenditure on credit cards attached to Charles Saatchi’s company in an attempt to persuade the jury this was a couple so extravagant they couldn’t possibly mind about the odd £700,000 gone missing.

I can even understand Francesca Grillo’s lawyer, Karina Arden, deliberately turning away from my sister while asking some of her most sarcastic questions, presenting Nigella with her (impressive) rear end. Anything to make the witness feel small or uncomfortable.

Yet there have been other occasions, so very much worse than this, where the treatment of prosecution witnesses has seemed vicious beyond all justification.

I am thinking of Frances Andrade, who committed suicide earlier this year after giving evidence against a man who had sexually assaulted her when she was his pupil.

I am particularly thinking of the parents of the murdered 13-year-old Milly Dowler, whose sex lives were trawled through in open court by the defence lawyer of the monstrous killer Levi Bellfield.

Close: Nigella with her brother Dominic Lawson and his wife Rosa Monckton at The Bluebird, King's Road, west London

After the trial, Milly’s sister said the sight of her parents being tormented this way was the most distressing aspect of the whole proceedings.

Yet the process of justice is seriously damaged if the system makes testifying intolerable for prosecution witnesses.

As Julie Spence, a former chief constable of Cambridgeshire, said after the Grillo case: ‘The treatment of Nigella Lawson in the witness box potentially is a setback for other witnesses in future trials.’

After my sister’s experience, I regret to say that if any friend with a reputation to maintain told me she had been asked to appear as a prosecution witness in a prominent case, I would advise her to consider self-preservation over civic duty — and certainly so if there were any chance that the defence would chance a claim against the witness of ‘bad character’.

Speaking about his sister, Mr Lawson said: 'My sister had been on trial, only without benefit of defence lawyers'

Since this was the issue that the Grillos’ lawyer chose to highlight — and Nigella was given no chance to submit any testimonials to the court (unlike the defendants) — I belatedly and post-trial testify that my sister is not of bad character.

She has a wonderful character, one I have seen blossom and flower over half a century.

She is enormously kind, not just to those who might seem important, but to anyone she feels needs help. Indeed, when her first marriage had ended and she inherited nothing but debts, she forked out £7,000 from her savings to pay for Elisabetta Grillo to have dental implants, which transformed the young Italian’s life by giving her the social confidence she had lacked.

Nigella understood this well, because in her much younger days she had very little self-confidence.

I so well remember how as a child she seemed scared to express an opinion — and sometimes I worry this might have been because she was afraid of some crushing retort on my part, as an older and more confident sibling.

Mr Lawson tells how he and his sister were so close they used to be mistaken for boyfriend and girlfriend when they were teenagers. they are pictured here at the Groucho Club in 2001

Fortunately, we have always had a very close relationship, occasionally even being mistaken for boyfriend and girlfriend when we were teen-agers. In the early Seventies, we went together to see Love Story at the Leicester Square Odeon. Nigella was below the permitted age and, then a skinny girl, stuffed enormous wads of paper tissues down a bra pinched from our mother’s wardrobe in order to pass off as someone older.

In the course of this tear-jerker, the tissues came out one by one, and so my snuffling sister left the cinema looking much more like her real age.

Though we both went on to become journalists, Nigella is far the kinder. It was absolutely in her character that in her days as a book reviewer and restaurant critic she had a personal rule never to give a bad notice to anyone whose first book or first restaurant it was.

She would hand back the commission rather than publish something that might blight a career at the outset.

That natural generosity of spirit (which those who don’t possess it can never understand) has always been shown in full to me.

Every time I have run into difficulties, either in my work or personal life, it is to Nigella that I have turned.

She has never let me down nor has she ever failed to offer loving support to her many friends — with food at the heart of it, naturally — when they have been suffering physically or mentally.

Like the vast majority of mothers, she cares more about her children than anything or anyone else.

Over the past few days, countless commentators have speculated about how the fall-out from the Grillo trial will affect Nigella’s career prospects here or in the U.S.

I can assure them that what is worrying her now is the pain caused to her children by this gruesome business.

If Nigella was as single-mindedly materialistic as they imply, she would hardly have refused to take a single penny from the fabulously wealthy Charles Saatchi in the divorce settlement.

I can’t think of any other woman who would have disregarded all legal advice and made no claims whatever on her husband of ten years.

Sometimes, those who see the best in others can suffer terrible betrayals. Nigella treated the Grillo sisters as friends — and she was to be bitterly disappointed.

But I know my sister well enough to say that she will continue to see the best in people — however much those of truly bad character delight in imagining the worst in her.